Introduction to Habitat Financial

Welcome to Habitat Financial! This “Getting Started” guide is intended to equip you with the basic skills to start processing your royalties and to help you understand how to manage our royalty reporting. This guide should take no more than one hour to fully walk through. By the end of this tutorial, you will understand how to onboard your business onto Habitat Financial & create artist statements.

What Is Habitat Financial?

Habitat Financial is a royalty processing and financial management platform for record labels, music publishers, distributors, and the musicians & songwriters they serve. We help labels and artists view content, data and financial information in one place, reduce the cost and labor of royalty accounting, and increase the transparency and regularity of payments in the music industry. You can give your entire team access to Habitat Financial, so they can manage their piece of the process. Habitat also grants your artists and rights-holders access to their own personal portal where they can view their statements & manage their data.

Finding Your Way Around

To get you started on your Habitat Financial journey, let’s first explain how Habitat Financial organizes data, & what each area within the system does. Altogether, Habitat Financial has 12 areas that can be accessed via our left-hand sided toolbar or via the main dashboard.

Tools highlighted are available on a Habitat Financial Pro plan.

1. Home – Your Habitat Financial dashboard
2. Alerts – This is where Habitat notifies you of any information that is missing and needs to be filled out. 
3. Statements – This is where you manage the production of your Statements and bundle revenue streams together into a Period. Habitat produces two types of period statements, Created (statements for your payees) and Received (statements for your label).
4. Content – This is where Habitat stores your content data and metadata, whether that’s releases and tracks for a record label, or works and publishers for a music publisher. Here you can organize your catalog and manage the metadata that will ultimately populate your statements, deals, and reports. Content is pulled automatically from your Revenue Streams.
5. Payees – This is where you input the people that you wish to send statements to and organize with in your deal. Clicking into a Payee will also display that Payee’s Lifetime Earnings Report—a detailed summary of the Payee’s total earnings across all reporting periods.
6. Deals – Deals are how you organize the terms of your agreements with your Payees. Whether this is the Artists, Composers, Sub-Publishers or Label Partners – you can organize their deal or contract terms, along with their specific deal sharing to payees.
7. Expenses – Our Expense feature allows you to track and recoup your expenses from your payee’s revenue. You can customize how expenses are recouped and at what rate. 
8. Revenue Streams – This is where you add sales data/reports to your Habitat account. Revenue Streams are the source from which we allocate revenue information based on Deals and Expenses. 
9. Payment – Our Payments engine allow you to issue payments to your artists or your right holders, or to record external payments made. Payments can be made through Wise, PayPal, Bank Transfer, Venmo, or Check.
10. Tools – Our Tools allow you to access Habitat’s premium features which include contract creation and signing, rights management, 1099 tax reporting, expense management, invoices, and project management.
11. Data – Our Analytics page gives you visual insight into your revenue. You can view your revenue by artist, platform, usage, and territories. From our data hub, you can define what you wish to visualize and how.
12. Account – The Account area is used to configure the system to your needs; allowing you to set language, change name, change password, establish phone number, email address.
13. Help – Here you can access our Habitat Financial Help Desk where common FAQs are answered and general royalty processing procedures are explained.

Each of these areas will eventually interact with one another. You upload your revenue reports in Revenue Streams; the data from these Reports will be linked to Content, or the tracks from your artists and rights holders; this Content is linked to your Deals, or the contract terms, which will calculate the royalties due; which is associated with a Payee so you know who to pay these royalties to. Once it’s time to account for your artists, we automatically bundle these sales and royalties into one Reporting Period that will create the Statement for your artists and show them what they have earned.

Now you know what Habitat Financial is, and the main elements, let’s look at the onboarding process.